Mother of a Devil
by Nerweniel
Summary: Minerva McGonagall remembers her daughter. Her daughter, whom she pities. Her daughter, whom she is ashamed of.
1. Minerva McGonagall, Saint

Does anyone know what guilt feels like? Does anyone realize how pain tastes? Does anyone know how it feels to live through years and years and years with the knowledge of having destroyed another life? And to, despite everything, hate the possessor of that life? Even when that person is your only daughter?  
  
No.  
  
Through long years of learning things the hard way, that is at least one thing I really have learnt: no-one knows what there things feel like.  
  
But I do.  
  
She's my child, my daughter, my flesh and my blood and yet I loathe her with every fiber of my long ago defeated body.  
  
I cannot help it.  
  
I have tried to fight it, but I have experienced that that would be equal to fighting myself. And I have fought myself- and I have lost. Minerva McGonagall can fight anyone- but Minerva McGonagall cannot fight herself. It's a sad story, in fact, but it is my story.  
  
My own, secret, long-forgotten tale, the Wild, Romantic Adventures of Minerva, the Heroine… also know as Strict Old McGonagall, the Woman Without a Life.   
  
Ironic, isn't it? The great Paradox –with a clear capital letter!- of my existence.   
  
And it's a wrong one anyway. I have a life- I had one.  
  
I've lived it long ago.  
  
But no-one knows. I've never told anyone, except Albus. Him, I had to tell. I had to explain to him why I, after years and tears, had returned to Hogwarts as my last sanctuary.   
  
But even he- even he doesn't know my child survived. Perhaps he suspects it- but he cannot know- not for sure. I don't think he's ever linked the child she was to the woman we all know.  
  
He must suspect something, though- he must suspect a reason behind my pertinent refusals to marry him. He proposes to me averagely once a year- he has now for about forty years. I have refused every single time.  
  
For Heaven's sake- I am perhaps the greatest sinner of a woman alive, how can I ever marry a man like Albus? Albus is good, righteous, noble, and what am I?  
  
I hope he does realize, though, what he means to me.  
  
My refusals to marry him have nothing to do with what I feel or what I don't feel for Albus.   
  
It's just the mere fact that it is not right.  
  
Albus doesn't know the entire truth, so he cannot understand it, and yet, I have the strange feeling he does.  
  
Albus is a very unusual man.  
  
He is my best friend and the one I trust the above everyone, yet he doesn't know.  
  
But who knows, after all?  
  
I sometimes wonder if- if she knows. She, the subject of it all- the point, the pivot, the subject of it all… the reason.  
  
He probably has told her, I believe. Yes- of course, he must have told her. He is not stupid- don't reveal to much, don't conceal to much. He can never have hidden this for her.   
  
He must have told her the truth. After she graduated.  
  
I've met her as a student of mine, of course- she attended Hogwarts. You know, I sometimes wonder why he's done that. Send her to Hogwarts. It would have been so easy for him to send her to Durmstrang- or somewhere else, for that matter.  
  
Was it his cruelty that brought her to me, or his so well-hidden kindness? I don't know.  
  
Both, perhaps.  
  
But so, I have taught her, my child, I have taught her and I have thus watched her from afar. Always busy keeping up the façade of stern Professor Gryffindor, death frightened to give away her ancestry by a look, by a gesture. She must have seen she does slightly resemble me. Not her eyes, no, but the hair… They were blondes, her hair was black- that must have proven something to her.  
  
But I have said nothing. I have watched and watched.  
  
And ve seen her heart be corrupted, more and more, every day, month, year.  
  
And I have done- nothing. 


	2. The Girl with the Ponytail

I recognized her immediately, that very first day. She was among the troop of frightened First Years whom I had to put on the Sorting Hat. And though I hadn't seen her since she'd been barely one week old, I saw her and I knew it. That slender, rather pale girl with her long, black hair neatly pulled back in a long ponytail, with those big, dark green eyes, was my daughter.  
  
It shouldn't have shocked me, after all- I knew that if she would attend Hogwarts, then she had to be in that year. And yet. A part of me had, though I heartily loathed myself for it, hoped, I believe, that she had died. That he had killed her, even. After all, it was possible, wasn't it? Wasn't it? His anger, always quickly to rise, could very well have turned itself towards the only thing I had left behind.  
  
My daughter, that is.  
  
It is cruel, I know, and it is selfish, but perhaps it had been the best for her as well.   
  
Because I loved her. I loved her and I still love her with the irrational love only a mother can feel, even though she knows her child is a devil. I know my daughter is a devil.  
  
I am the mother of a devil.  
  
Yet there was a faint sparkle of hope in my heart, you know, as I saw her stand there. She did so resemble me, with her serious little face, with her back straightened, with her hands quietly folded. I hoped- I hoped- perhaps it was possible. Perhaps my blood was strong enough to destroy… or at least, mitigate… the track of evil that flew- flows- through his veins…  
  
My hopes were all destroyed during her first week.  
  
She, my child, was sorted into Slytherin.   
  
Well, of course she was- how could I ever have hoped to get her into Gryffindor? She was raised by- by… Yet I had hoped, and only with the greatest difficulty I controlled myself- smiled, took the Sorting Hat and put it on the head of the next pupil waiting.  
  
As soon as I reached my rooms, I succumbed, though.  
  
My child was a Slytherin.  
  
It was perhaps childish, but I saw that as a sort of sign- a bad sign, in fact.   
  
And it was.  
  
I taught her, my daughter, and though she was good at my subject- she had some of my genes, after all…- it didn't interest her. But that wasn't the worst part, actually. I could live with that.  
  
I couldn't live with the fact that she didn't even like me.  
  
I could have guessed it, I suppose- me being Head of Gryffindor- but I could not live with it.  
  
Yet, I did.  
  
And so, when she quit Transfigurations class in 6th year, I wasn't even disappointed anymore. Hurt, sad, lonely, everything, but not disappointed. In those five years, she had managed to convince me that she was more like her father than I had ever dared to think possible.  
  
Yet I couldn't hate her like she hated me- I loved her and I still love her.  
  
As I have once loved her father…  
  
And so, before I even realized it, in fact, her seven years were over and she graduated. I had barely shared a word with her. With her, my flesh, my blood, the girl who resembled me even though I did not want to admit it, even to myself.  
  
I was grateful when she graduated, and yet I couldn't be happy- of course I couldn't.  
  
I felt guilty, as I have felt guilty all my life.  
  
Belle, my Belle- Bellatrix, as he has renamed you…  
  
Belle, I am sorry. 


	3. Misery of a Mother

And years passed. Years and years and years passed after her graduation, and I was happy. Or- I was as happy as I could possibly be, being the woman whose only daughter was a Death Eater who loathed her… Still, the first years after her leaving Hogwarts came as nothing less than a real relief to me. Seven years, seven long, bitter years of sheer torture I had lived through, and with her gone, everything, my dear, beloved home of Hogwarts, finally turned back to normal again. I could finally, finally take my seat at the Head Table in the Great hall again, without feeling my eyes being dragged to that black-haired, dark-eyed slender little thing and her Slytherin friends.. Without having to hear her sniggering, without hearing her scold me because of the huge amounts of homework I gave. It's strange- I've known generations of students to complain about me for that, yet suddenly, those very well-know words cut like a blade through my heart. It was a new experience, and one I could certainly live without. Her seventh year was the worst, I recall. Albus saw me suffer and, darling he was and is, proposed to me at least once a month that year. I refused, of course, but he never gave up. Albus Dumbledore, most powerful wizard ever, my best friend and the one and only never giving up suitor I have ever had…  
  
It's not that he just proposed to me to help me, to be able to protect me or whatever so called "good" but so unsatisfying reason a man may have for a proposal. No, he loved me, and I recall he still does.  
  
And I love him as I always have.  
  
But Belle stands, and has always stood, between us.  
  
Yet it's not as if that isn't entirely my own fault.  
  
But those years after her graduation were really happy. One time, about ten years later, I even considered actually saying "yes" when Albus would ask me again! Poor dear- he'd probably immediately have died of a heart attack, and left me an early widow… But I must not be joking. Because that is what I have been- a widow, and though I have never been married, and though Belle's father isn't even dead, I mourn over the person I once loved.  
  
I will remain a widow.  
  
So I did not say "yes" to Albus, but not because of that reason. I didn't even properly realize that by then. Realization always dawns too slowly, I have experienced in my long life. And now, in my relatively old age, it has finally come.  
  
My reason for what perhaps was about my fiftieth refusal to Albus, was something entirely different. Something horrible, something unimaginable and the only thing I have ever really blamed my child for.  
  
I was utterly shocked when I heard about the attack on Frank and Alice Longbottom. Frank- one of the most talented and kindest Gryffindors I had ever taught, and Alice, that little, smiling Hufflepuff with her two, dark-brown braids and all her courage…  
  
Both Aurors they had become, and I could not tell how proud I was of them. And still am, for that matter. Poor, poor Frank and Alice, and poor Neville- their son of barely six month of age. Poor couple, tortured into madness by the greatest devil but one.  
  
My daughter.  
  
My Belle, named by me after her half-French, half-Scottish grandmother.  
  
Belle Rosemary McGonagall-Merlynn. My mom.  
  
And now I, Minerva, daughter and mother of a Belle, attended the Wizegamot trial of the girl I had given life, so long ago. I sat there, among the crowd, next to Albus, who held my hand which I gratefully squeezed. He could never have understood my fear, my anger, my sadness, yet I have the strange feeling he did. He saw the tears which no-one else noticed, he felt my shivers which no-one else perceived, he heard me silent prayers to which no-one else listened. And he answered them with prayers of his own- soft and perhaps meaningless, yet soothing whispers in my ear.  
  
I could only think of one thing, though.   
  
Don't, please don't, sentence her to the Kiss…  
  
Everything, but not that, please, please…   
  
My love for her went beyond reason, beyond my own feelings even. I loved her beyond what was true and right, I loved her with the same, unexplainable love I had once given her father.  
  
My prayers must have reached the good Lord, because she wasn't Kissed by the Dementors. She and her- her horrible husband, Rodolphus Lestrange, one of the most despicable Slytherins I had ever taught!- were locked up in Azkaban to die there…   
  
I didn't pity her, though. She had done wrong and she would have to pay for it. That was only right.  
  
Yet I still love her, the first-but-one greatest devil ever.  
  
And do you then really want to know who the greatest devil himself was?  
  
It was her father.

THE END

A/N: So here ends the first part, Minerva's POV, of the trilogy this will become! Look out for the second part "Daughter of a Saint", from Bellatrix' POV!


End file.
